In Dallas, she ran whiskey in a black roadster in the early decades of the last century. In 1933, she got in a fight with another woman and shot her twice -- once in the stomach and once in the back. The judge sentenced her to 30 years. It would've been less, but she "sassed the judge" in the courtroom.

She also had the voice of Billie Holiday, with a tinge of Bob Wills, according to a new book by Caroline Gnagy. Ellis became a star on WBAP's Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, a radio program that helped highlight inmate stories of rehabilitation through music. Soon, she was getting thousands of fan letters. Her voice is now enshrined in the Library of Congress as part of John A. Lomax's recordings at the Goree State Farm outside Huntsville.

Ellis' story is one of dozens collected by Gnagy in Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History (The History Press, $21.99). The book focuses on the WBAP radio program and highlights the tradition of using music behind bars to give inmates cultural experiences to help them on the outside.

Gnagy shares the stories of blues legends like Dallas' Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, and groups like the Goree All-Girl String Band, who became regional celebrities for their incarcerated performances on WBAP and live shows around the state.

Through their music, these inmates were able to share their stories of wrongdoing and redemption far and wide. Gnagy spoke with The Dallas Morning News about the new book, prison music and what that tradition means for the modern correctional system.

The Serenaders, a prison dance orchestra, performs on WBAP's Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls in 1943. The radio program shared prisoner stories as well as music as a form of rehabilitation for incarcerated individuals.

(Texas Prison Museum)

[Interview with author Caroline Gnagy edited for length and clarity.]

Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls from WBAP fit into a tradition of barn dance radio shows, right? Can you tell us a little bit about it? How popular was it, what was the format?

Well, it started on March 24, 1938, that was the inaugural show. We had an audience of rabid radio listeners that were looking for something new and exciting and also something that rang true with their everyday lives. There was a similarity to barn dance radio in the fact that they played a lot of barn dance type favorites like country music songs and Western and fiddle songs, but it was also partially a vaudevillian, amateur hour-like radio show. [It was also] a public relations show. An announcer with WBAP in Fort Worth would announce the inmates. Then there would be an inmate announcer who would, in-turn, announce the bands as they came on the air with a brief description. It was an integrated radio show. There were bands of all races and genders. Male, female, African-American, Mexican or Latin; they even played Hawaiian songs.

It challenged perceptions of not just what today's Texas penal system is like, but what it was like at the time. How did they go about putting this together to challenge that?

I think definitely, historically we could view it as a challenge. I think for them it was a project for improvement. In this era, we're talking about an era of progressivism. Then there's the Good Neighbor policies of the 1930s and a lot of the public wanted to hear stories of people like them. Even FDR employed such tactics with his fireside chats, etc. So the prison system, they had a very canny guy by the name of Lee Simmons who had orchestrated a few things, including the Texas Prison Rodeo, which also played a large part with the bands. After his administration they really started to focus in on the rehabilitative aspects in the community. They wanted to improve the perception. There had been reports of brutality and I don't think these were inaccurate reports. This was a plantation prison farm. It was rough, brutal, hot, there was no air-conditioning, no heat. The conditions were really horrendous for anyone who was in it. So they were really combating a lot of these public perceptions of a very tough system by trying to humanize themselves as well as the inmates a little bit, make themselves relatable to the public. They really tried to humanize the experience a little more so people wouldn't have the idea that they were solely inhumane or that the convicts in the system were inhuman or evil. It could be someone who made a bad decision based on hard times. It could've been someone like their niece or nephew or mother or daughter or anybody, really.

The book is full of these great anecdotes and inmate profiles. One that jumped out at me was "Leadbelly" Ledbetter. You mentioned that he tried to sing his way into a pardon by writing a song for the governor of Texas.

Yes. And I do think that was successful. His music prowess was well-known in the prison system. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, was an astute fellow. He knew how to play on people, I think that's one of the most identifiable aspects of his music. He knew people and he knew how to work it to his advantage when he was in a tough situation. So he chose an opportunity in the presence of the people who had the power and made it seem like it was spontaneous, which was really clever. I think he worked really hard to obtain that in that aspect. He subsequently was given his freedom, although the world didn't discover his music until John Avery Lomax came through Angola Prison [in Louisiana] when he was there a few years later. He got loose here [in Texas], but then he got back in trouble. Lomax found him in Angola and recorded him at that time.

You talked about another one of those Lomax recordings, of Hattie Ellis, whose voice you compared to Billie Holliday. You mentioned she sang a jazz song in the style of Western swing king Bob Wills.

I do think so, yeah. First of all, the fact that Lomax recorded [her] was a really impressive thing because Lomax and his son, Alan, they went through the prison looking for African-American folk songs because they had a mission. They wanted to find songs that were archaic, primal forms of the music and they really wanted to exclude anything that was modern or jazz. "I Ain't Got Nobody" was a popular jazz song from that era. There were a number of different artists who had already recorded it by that time they came through 1939 to record Hattie Ellis. She was already popular on the radio show and perhaps they pushed her in front of the Lomaxes. She definitely was an amazing singer. I listened to the recordings and I listened to some of the versions of other artists who had recorded [the same song] by 1939. The people who I found her closest resemblance was Bob Wills. This was Texas, perhaps that was the version she had to learn from. But she had this style that melded the two cultures. She did not sound like Louis Armstrong and she didn't sound like some of the others. With her lyrics and vocal styles, she sounded the most like Bob Wills. That was a really neat assimilation of two different aspects of the same song.

A group of singers from the Goree Unit strike a pose at the Texas Prison Rodeo.

(Texas Department of Criminal Justice)

What made audiences connect with this kind of country music, and why did prisoners perform it?

The prisoners performed songs that were popular with the public. They played songs that were patriotic, they played Hawaiian-style songs, they played sentimental "home sweet home" type songs, lots of cowboy songs and they really went for the popular tunes. I think partially that's a logistical reason and that's they're easy to learn. They may have been complex, but they were easier to learn because there was sheet-music. That's how they learned to play. Many of these people didn't perform or play before they went in. That was really fascinating because they had to learn from the other inmates. Sheet music was available and they had what was called a prison sheet music library. They played songs that people wanted to hear and I think there's the curiosity, the novelty, the incredible, compelling idea of hearing someone on the radio whose criminal case you may have read about in the newspaper a couple years prior. There's this sort of fascination, I don't want to say lurid, but kind of. Also the understanding and realization that these were men and women who were not so far off from their own brother or sister or wife or mother. They used the inmate interviews to kind of underscore that aspect of it. I think the inmates really wanted to provide that, to let the people see they were human. And they really did. I mean we're talking thousands of fan letters each week. First week I think it was 3,000, it was 100,000 for one show at one point, we're talking about thousands. It's kind of crazy when you think about it.

Yeah, that's a lot of prison mail.

Yep, exactly. And it wasn't just mail. There were gifts of money, of homemade items, even food. At that time, they were better able to accept items like that.

So this wasn't just a small group of avid listeners, this was a more widely popular thing. So groups like the Goree All-Girl String Band, how recognizable would they have been in mainstream culture, at least in Texas?

The Goree All-Girl String Band performs at the Texas Prison Rodeo in Huntsville. The group was immensely popular both behind bars and among fans in the community.

(Texas Department of Criminal Justice)

In that area of Texas they had to have been recognizable not just because they were on the radio. The radio show was an integral part, first and foremost, because it aired from WBAP in Fort Worth which was a clear channel radio station. It had 50,000 watts, so it was heard by people from Canada to Mexico, but on a local level they also did a live floor show every week before the radio program. They had hundreds of people arrive at the prison to line up at the prison gates to go into the auditorium to watch these inmates perform the songs they would later perform on the radio. So they knew them, they learned their stories, the more notable inmates may have had stories that were in the newspaper. On top of that, these inmates went out into the community. They went out in Texas. They played the Shreveport rodeo. They played fiddle festivals in Athens and Carthage. They played public functions and fairs and the state fair, so they were out there as well as being inside. I think on a national level, people would know them from the radio, but on a local level they'd know them just by seeing them in person for a time.

What can we learn from these musicians. Why do their stories matter today?

There's a couple different reasons. I think there's still a sort of lurid fascination. When you think of the Texas prison system, you think about a large-scale systematic depersonalization of the inmate experience, for lack of a better phrase. While things were brutal back in the day, I think they were very personally brutal to many of the inmates, but there was also a feeling of hope and a real possibility of rehabilitation. I think that's been lost in recent decades. I think that this book will help highlight how things used to be. Perhaps we can, without bringing back that brutality, bring back some of that spirit of rehabilitation. I also know this history doesn't happen just in Texas, it happened in many states. And there are some prison systems that are using prison bands, music programs, as part of their inmate rehabilitation. But there aren't many and certainly not Texas at this time, although it did persist for many decades. We all know that music is a very important part of feeling alive. If you're in a situation like a prison, you don't get to feel like that. On top of that, it's so incredibly helpful for people in a group setting to get to feel a sense of accomplishment. Learning songs, performing music, to work with a team to create something that's just positive simply for itself.